Page 33 of The Exit Strategy

And, every morning, after I’ve made my own cup, I reach into the cabinet to find the hidden decaf coffee I make for Cole.

Today I hold it for a full ten seconds though. Debating. Warring. Cursing myself.

This has always been the plan!

Strategic sabotage to keep him off balance and even the scales a bit. And if I don’t maintain the upper hand, I’ll have to admit that last night…mattered, and quite honestly, I’d rather chew on glass. But the dark circles that have appeared under his eyes haunt me now.

I put the freaking decaf back and grind more of the caffeinated beans. I press brew for an entire pot, then leave his mug untampered with on the counter where he’ll find it after I’m gone.

There’s no need to examine why.

Cole Whittaker is but a bump in my pothole-filled road, nothing more.

With my mug in my hands, I retreat to the conference room before I hear his bedroom door open upstairs. That’s how comfortable I’ve become in this space. I know the click of his bedroom door, and that knowledge is a poison in my veins.

How much more of this can I take?

Heavy footsteps hit the stairs, and I stare straight ahead at my screen because the sight of Cole Whittaker in the gray sweatpants he insists on wearing every goddamn morning just might be the two-handed shove that sends me flailing into the feelings I’m actively attempting to avoid.

Two hoursand three cups of coffee later, I’m staring at something that ignites my spiteful ways.

I’ve been inside The Haven’s books for weeks now. At first, the damage looked like incompetence—misallocated funds, duplicated payments made to look like a clerical error, vendor accounts that don’t match invoices. All stuff that could technically be considered innocent mistakes by someone who isn’t qualified and is in over their heads.

But incompetence is random. Incompetence doesn’t follow a pattern.

And this? This is a pattern.

Opening another spreadsheet, I begin the tedious process of cross-referencing the vendor payments against the actual contracts to confirm what my gut already knew.

Devin didn’t mismanage The Haven’s finances. He funneled them. Systematically. Over months. Small enough to avoid detection, large enough to matter, and now I’m close to having proof—a bank account registered to an LLC I can’t find a physical address for. Whoever set it up knew what they were doing.

It’s the kind of careful that requires a very good accountant or a very paranoid thief.

I’ve even deep-dived into Cole’s personal accounts because yes, I’m thorough like that. The only thing out of the ordinary was a very large personal loan that he’s never missed a payment on. Maybe he bought Nana Mae’s land outright? Still, I wonder briefly why he took out that type of loan, but because it’s all aboveboard and not connected to his business accounts, I decide to move on. Not that I expected to find him stealing from himself, but he probably didn’t expect Devin to…

I sit back in my chair and tap my pen against the table. The tap, tap, tap is like a drill to my forehead.

Devin didn’t just steal from Cole—he framed the LLC to look like Cole’s doing. It’s the only thing that makes sense. I just have to find the proof.

It changes Nana Mae’s narrative completely. This isn’t a nephew in over his head. This is someone who looked at a family business, a community of retirees, and saw an opportunity.

Mae’s nephew stole from people with trust so ingrained in their belief system that they never saw it coming.

I pull up the bank routing number again and run itthrough every public database I can access. It’s another dead end. Then I try cross-referencing the LLC registration against state filings. Still nothing.

Money always leaves a trail. Wherever Devin was funneling money to, he knew how to bury the trail. But I have this thread, and I will pull, and pull, and pull because numbers don’t lie and I’m very good at making them talk.

My phone buzzes with a direct message from Fen, and I grind my teeth.

Fen: Don’t freak out.

Great. My favorite opener from a man whose entire career is built on controlling narratives.

Junie: What now?

Fen: Grace did a podcast. The Unfiltered Hour. It has 2.3 million subscribers.

Fen: Just when your story was beginning to fade, she stepped it up. Again.